Best Perennial Bed Ever! So far, anyway. This year, at least.
Beaky wrote a wonderful diary awhile back about shade gardens. I have tons of shade, so tons of ferns, hostas, astilbes, jack-in-the-pulpits, I could go on and on. Love my shade plants. Love their foliage, their determination, their existence.
My yard doesn’t have any full sun (8+ hours), but my big perennial bed does just fine. Not all the plants that are theoretically “full sun” actually require that. Beaky wanted photos when I could get them, and even though I still have a crappy phone camera, today’s production was so breathtaking I wanted to share even a crappy photo.
Nothing is particularly rare. I don’t think anything in it is rare now that I consider the question. But this bed has been pumping out beauty for months now, which shows you don’t have to have an exotic specimen to love your flowers.
From left to right, front to back:
Two clumps of blood root in the front row. They bloom in early spring, daisy-like flowers with pointed petals, tiny. Then the leaves grow to an enormous size, rounded serrations (that’s probably not the right term), so that they are unrecognizable as the delicate bloomers they start out as.
Next to the first clump of blood root is columbine. Like the blood root it is an early bloomer, but the foliage is lovely all summer.
Okay, jeer at me. The next plant is a shag-bark hickory tree. I WILL dig it up, again, and eventually it WILL stop coming back, but for cryin’ out loud, if I don’t spot it the first year, it puts down a tap root that refuses to quit. ‘Nough said. Just to its right is a stray lamb’s ear. Since my main stands of this don’t always come back strongly, I always let the strays grow, in case they are needed to fill in the next year.
Next are the stachys, variety cotton candy. They need to be dead-headed, but I am always slow to do that. This was the first year my husband noticed and admired them. He thought the clump he was looking at was the only one. No, there are a half-dozen stands. I only bought one, and the rest are from dividing them. If you can enlarge the picture to look closely, you’ll again see really distinctive foliage, little rounded serrations.
To the right of the stachys, and in the center-center are irises. They finished blooming weeks ago. Generally I’m not a fan of foliage that looks like grass, but irises make up for that with spectacular flowers. Plus, these are from my sister’s garden. She died a year and a half ago, and they make me think of her and that makes me happy.
Second “row” in starts with the yellow coreopsis, which has had a crazy long blooming season this year, and has delicate foliage before and after blooming. Next to the coreopsis is a major clump of lamb’s ear. The lamb’s ear came from my mother, so ditto my sister’s irises why I love them so. But also, too, the soft, pale foliage.
The weedy mess next to the lamb’s ear was a narcissus. So sue me, I didn’t get an annual in there when it died back. Maybe in 2021 I’ll be well enough organized.
Next is an astilbe, given to me by my daughter’s mother-in-law. The wedding was at our home, just immediate family, in August, and although it was hot and humid, the gardens were everything my daughter had hoped for. I take a picture of this astilbe every year to send on to the M-I-L to show it’s still thriving. Eleven years now. A thick foliage for an astilbe — I don’t have anything else that looks like it. Ivory flowers, not dead-headed yet, as you can see.
Next row back may be a bit hard to figure out. I’ll ignore the big-leaved plant for now. Next to it is a cranesbill, very common, pink flowers. They grow everywhere — in this semi-sun garden and in the deep woods. The difference is how many blooms they put out. But, of course, look at the foliage. They are done blooming and still gorgeous.
Next is another astilbe, also done blooming, more typical astilbe foliage, followed L-R by rudbeckia daisy (they look like black-eyed Susan, which are temperamental and can’t be transplanted so the hell with them, I stick with the rudbeckia), liatris (aka gayfeather), then echinacea (aka cone flower). Again, nothing exotic, but all have beautiful, distinctive foliage, and beautiful, distinctive blooms. The liatris blooms from the top down, unlike most scapes with multiple blooms. The cone flower provides us with bright, yellow fireworks in late summer, when it goes to seed and hordes of goldfinches descend on them to eat. The fireworks happen when you walk by and the birds explode in panic.
To the right of the echinacea is a not really representative (for my garden) flox. This one actually is the right size, 3 — 4 feet tall. Most of the rest of my flox grow to 5 — 6 feet. Don’t know why. Same with my dome asters. They get immense before they bloom. I assume it’s a problem with the soil, but whoa. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Those enormous-leaved plants in the second and third rows are eggplants. Since most of my yard is shady, we have feeble vegetable production, but a couple of years ago I decided to plant eggplant in the annual section of the perennial garden. They have great foliage and really cool flowers. Well, they’re happy, they’re productive enough, and this is the third year for them.
The last plants, in the back, are Queen Anne’s lace and balloon flower. Mostly to the left and intermingled with the QA lace are wild asters. They are starting to bud up, but won’t bloom until late August into September. And that is what a perennial garden is all about: Flowers from March to October.
This has been an important year for gardening. No church choir singing, no visits to daughter in Seattle, texting and calls only for friends and for my very lonely brother-in-law. Hand surgery, masks to go anywhere, praying my company doesn’t go under (Yay for PPP), my poor nephew who was robbed of a proper graduation and who knows what the future holds. When working in my gardens, I’m lost in a little park of my own design, built by my husband and me over the course of two decades. I am blessed.
Hope you enjoy my little world.
